Thursday, June 23, 2011

Death is not immersive

The omnipresent casual/hardcore ideology has lead to those who think that death should be trivial and happen rarely, and those that think that death should happen all the time and be harsh.

Both is wrong. While the 'casual' point of view at least works in arcade games, the 'hardcore' point of view only works in the most niche and most gamey games.

To those who claim to care about the simulation and often lean towards the hardcore side, I say: Death is not immersive. Whenever your character dies you are violently thrown out of the simulation. Great games instill a desperate fear of death in the player without having him die all that often - never if possible.

To those who think that frequent death is a necessary gameplay element, I say: Death should not be abused for gameplay purposes. There are better ways to give the player clear feedback about is actions.

6 comments:

  1. "Whenever your character dies you are violently thrown out of the simulation."

    Ah-ha! But it is realistic to be thrown out of the simulation when you die, because in real life you are thrown out of life you die. Therefore, to be thrown out of the simulation is, in fact, a great simulation.

    But yeah, I agree on the games part. Punishing a player's mistake by removing them from the game completely is not fun gameplay. Like you said in your previous posts, penalties can be fun and interesting without making players break their keyboards over their knees.

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  2. To those who think that frequent death is a necessary gameplay element, I say: Death should not be abused for gameplay purposes. There are better ways to give the player clear feedback about is actions.

    Depends on the game. Games like Out of This World or Limbo rely heavily on repeated death "abuse" for gameplay purposes. I have not personally played Limbo, but Out of This World heavily punished said deaths by only having sporadic save points making figuring out the do-or-die puzzles sometimes annoying when you came to a solution but then died in the execution. That annoyance, however, was tempered by an otherwise engaging game with zero dialog or explanations of any kind.

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  3. @Straw Fellow
    First, 'realistic' is a very bad term in this context. No fantasy game is ever realistic, and none should be. The reason I avoid this term whenever possible is that it attracts the 'fireballs are not realistic'-crowd.

    Second, if your game had exteneded perma death, that is, not only your char gets deleted, but also your game, then death might be immersive. But if you just fire up a new char, or just ghost-walk to your corspe, death is not immersive, in my opinion.
    It made sense if players looked at the game as a one-time trip that ends at death; but nobody does this. For good reasons ;)

    Azuriel, those games do this, but they are not a good simulation. And they don't want to be one. They are a puzzles. You're not immersed anymore the 5th time in a row that your character dies; and you are not supposed to be.

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  4. "Great games instill a desperate fear of death in the player without having him die all that often."

    I think Darkfall hit this just as you say it. Despite all the reports of newb ganking, as a newb, I was ganked a grand total of 3 times in my first month. But yet, I was constantly afraid of it, hiding in shadows, listening for footsteps. This made the game viscerally excellent for me (though I could see where the constant fear would drive others away).

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  5. Thanks for the comment, Roboticus.

    I think a desperate fear of death is not equivalent with a omnipresent desperate fear of death. For example me, in real life, I really, really don't want to die right now .. but that doesn't mean that I am actually afraid of it right now.

    To always be threatend at all time is a bit stressful and I can understand that some players (most?) don't like that.

    I should have been clearer in the post, I think.

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  6. Yeps, there has to be a middle ground. Death penalties in games that have multiple game-play options will have to vary.

    I think the most perfected death penalty I've seen up to date is in Unreal Tournament. It's covers both free-for-all and 1v1 death match nicely. Hint: "m-m-m-monster kill".

    In MMOs, death penalties need to vary depending on your activity. And realm type. I think it's important to let players choose between hardcore rules and normal rules. Hardcore is extremely important for RP oriented open world enthusiasts, where normal equally important for people who want to rush in and bash skulls carelessly.

    In example: WoW could easily have a HC realm where permanent death as a base design, but then that could be circumvented by player intervention (resurrection spells), or NPC intervention in BGs and Raiding.

    Permanent death as a base design opens so many new doors for interesting game-play designs and diversity it's mind boggling.

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